I then compare Cesaire's Caribbean "shape" to that of Rene Depestre, and a quite different model emerges. I find that Africa is relatively absent in Depestre's work: Europe is not presented as a threat; and that Depestre, unlike Cesaire, sees, in the Caribbean, an energy and a creativity brought about by the historical fusion of disparate cultures. I consider how the reality of Depestre's long exile from the Caribbean has affected his views of the islands.

This book thematically analyses and surveys areas of Caribbean history and society. The work is divided into three parts: part one addresses migration and identity; part two explores policy and development; and part three explores music and literature. The volume places a fresh perspective on these topics. The essays depart from the usual broader themes of politics, economics and society and provide a deeper insight into forces that left a decisive legacy on aspects of the Caribbean region. Such contributions come at a time when some of the Caribbean territories are marking over 50 years as independent nation states and attempting to create, understand and forge ways of dealing with critical national and regional issues. The volume brings together a broad group of scholars writing on Caribbean issues including postgraduate students, lecturers, and researchers. Each chapter is thematically divided into the aforementioned areas. This book addresses areas much deeper than the linear historical and social science models, and it offers Caribbean academics and researchers a foundation for further research.

The Circum-Caribbean and its diasporas constitute a space of relations and disconnections. Historically, the Caribbean served as a bridgehead for the European conquest of the Americas and a point of exchange of human beings, ideas, and commodities. It also became a laboratory of modern forms of social, political, and economic production. Today, the region represents a multilingual space of conviviality for many different cultures, but is also the focus of the dissonances, ruptures and insularities produced by its distinct histories of colonialism and resistance. This interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore how (non-)circulation of ideas occurred historically in the glocal production of knowledge in and about the Caribbean and to formulate a clearer picture of who is creating which vision of the Caribbean, and how. The 33 contributions in this volume shed light on the transversal fields of (1) Academic and Artistic Approaches, (2) Arts and Visual Studies, (3) Environment and Sustainability, (4) Migration and Knowledge Circulation, (5) Entangled Histories and Memories. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature provides readers with an excellent introduction to recent Haitian literature, one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas. Martin Munro focuses on works written after 1946, a period in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian literature. Using this notion of Haitian writing as a literature of exile, Munro analyzes key novels by the most important figures of each generation of the past sixty years, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat.

Caribbean cultural identity is dynamic and complex but also continuously in flux. In the 21st century, the Caribbean is both a site of cultural convergence and divergence. Though influenced by common histories of slavery, indentureship and European colonization and postcolonialism, the multi-ethnic diaspora and new globalized dispensation has resulted in an ever-changing, yet unique Caribbean culture. In Caribbean Dynamics: Re-configuring Caribbean Culture, the authors present the multi-vocality of Caribbean culture with an integrated overview of the social, political and cultural themes that dominate the Caribbean landscape. Francophone, Anglophone, Dutch and Spanish creolization in the Caribbean is examined to reveal reconfigured national and regional identities. Divided into 3 main sections, the first, 'The Dynamics of Carib-being', looks at how literature has helped to shape Caribbean identities. The second section, 'Performing Arts: Mapping out the Caribscape' presents the diversity of Caribbean culture, while the third section, 'Transcending Adversity to Foster a Caribbean Culturalist Ethos' examines how Caribbean cultural identity is articulated and translated in social and government policies. This examination of the Caribbean 'being', 'performing' and 'transcending' steps outside of traditional interrogations of identity and provides a timely panoramic view of emergent issues in a globalized Caribbean region. Caribbean Dynamics investigates both the collectiveness and singularity of the Caribbean and reveals the mosaic that is Caribbean cultural identity; hewn from the past, honed by trans-border diasporic influences and woven into the tapestry of a new globalized cultural landscape.

In the light of, and in response to, the popular perception of the Caribbean as an epitome of cultural hybridity and improvisation, this book seeks to further examine Caribbean cultural identities along the lines of race, class, nationalism, and history. Drawing on a variety of genres of literature and popular music, the present volume includes not only essays that stress the shaping and reshaping of Afro-Caribbean cultural identities and the significance of hybridization, but also those that think against the grain and pursue questions which have not received enough critical attention. This latter task can be seen in the attempt to probe the phenomenon that the Caribbean's image as a tropical getaway in metropolitan popular imaginations tends to eclipse its troubled pasts, traumatic memories, and current (and recurrent) problems which elude the rhetoric of cultural hybridity, presupposing instead a certain non-conflictual diversity or racial equality in the relatively innocuous realm of culture. Although nuanced among themselves on certain issues, the individual chapters together highlight a body of work which is distinct from the bulk of Anglo-American academic productions on the Caribbean, as the majority of the textual and cultural materials treated here come from either the Hispanic or Francophone Caribbean.